Archive of Our Own

In 2020, the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) made a commitment to our users, members, and volunteers that we would work towards making our organization and our projects more welcoming and inclusive to fans of color, and preventing and combating racist harassment on our platforms.

We provided an update on this work in 2023, acknowledging that progress had not been as fast as we had hoped, sharing details of the changes that had been made by that point, and laying out the road ahead.

Today we are delighted to share that we have fulfilled the last of the promises we made to you back in 2020. While we celebrate the hard work and dedication to improvement that has taken us to this point, we also regret that it has taken us five years to get here. We are sincerely grateful for all the support we've received from our users, members, and volunteers to complete this work, and we apologize that it has taken this long to do so.

This post lays out both the progress we've made and the specific ways our 2020 promises have been fulfilled, as well as what is coming next and how we will ensure that our work doesn't stop here.

What We've Done

Since our update in 2023, we have completed the following goals to help protect our users and volunteers against harassment:

1. Reviewed and updated the AO3 Terms of Service (TOS) and TOS FAQ. You can read more about this update in the news post announcing the TOS review as well as the accompanying review guide. For some key highlights, we:
   1. Simplified the language and removed redundancies throughout the TOS in order to improve readability for all users, including those who may have English as an Additional Language (EAL);
   2. Generalized the Abuse Policy to provide the AO3 Policy & Abuse committee (PAC) with greater flexibility to determine how to address harassment and other TOS violations; and
   3. Reviewed the existing mandatory Archive warnings and considered new ones.
2. Improved admin tools, particularly for the Policy & Abuse committee so that they can more easily handle Abuse reports.
3. Implemented improvements to AO3 to help curate your Archive experience, including:
   1. Expanded blocking features to cover more situations, including preventing unsolicited gifts from blocked users and preventing kudos from users you've blocked.
   2. Further limiting how guest users can interact with you, such as stripping embedded images in guest comments and adding a preference to prevent guests from replying to your comments on other users' works and on news posts.
   3. Restarted the creation of "No Fandom" canonical additional tags to allow users to more easily filter in and filter out for concepts as they want. Read more about new canonicals in the Tag Wrangling news posts.
   4. Implemented collection tags and improved collection filters.
4. The Diversity Consultant Research Officer completed their internal review, engaged with contractors, and made a culture audit firm recommendation to the OTW Board in 2023.
1. Following that recommendation, the OTW contracted with an audit firm and underwent a months-long organizational culture audit that included interviews with volunteers at every level of the organization and in every committee.
2. The Board, working with the firm and OTW volunteers from several committees, created an Organizational Culture Roadmap of items that need to be addressed and changed to promote a healthier and safer OTW for all our volunteers.
3. To ensure the completion of these goals, we established the OTW Culture Roadmap Workgroup. This is an independent body from the Board so that this work is unaffected by Board turnover. This work remains ongoing and will continue long beyond this update.
5. Made multiple changes to the procedures of public Board meetings and Board communications generally, to improve transparency regarding Board work and OTW progress. This includes:
1. Implemented a new moderation system for public Board meetings, as of the November 2023 public meeting, allowing the Board to address questions raised during public meetings; since the July 2024 public meeting, started addressing questions submitted asynchronously from people who can’t attend the meeting live.
2. Implemented professional customer relationship management tools for Board work and Board email/communication.
3. Released bi-weekly internal updates regarding Board and BAT work to OTW volunteers.
6. Created two new committees and two new subcommittees to better support the completion of these goals and our long-term sustainability as an organization:
1. Internal Complaint and Conflict Resolution: subcommittee responsible for addressing volunteer complaints and conflicts independent from involved committees.
2. News Post Moderation: subcommittee responsible for moderating comments on AO3 and OTW news posts, ensuring they abide by the OTW News Post Moderation Policy.
3. Board Assistants Team: committee assisting the OTW Board of Directors with administrative tasks and project management.
4. User Response Translation: committee responsible for addressing PAC and Support’s translation needs in specific high-need languages.
7. Completed and published a Whistleblower Protection Policy to outline and enshrine the protections for people who make reports about misconduct in the OTW.

What We're Doing

We know that creating a safer environment for our users and volunteers is an ongoing responsibility, and we remain deeply committed to addressing harassment with both urgency and care. While the steps outlined in our 2020 statement marked an important beginning, we recognise that true progress requires continuous effort beyond fulfilling those initial commitments. We are dedicated to building on that foundation with transparency, accountability, and compassion.

We are committed to and already continuing to work beyond our 2020 promises to ensure that this work does not end here. Some examples of our ongoing commitment include:

1. Completing the ongoing project to review the OTW Code of Conduct in full, bringing it into line with industry standards and updating it in collaboration with volunteer feedback;
2. Supporting the ongoing development and growth of the Internal Complaint and Conflict Resolution subcommittee;
3. Working on the 2023-2026 Strategic Plan's Diversifying Spaces goals; and
4. Making AO3 more accessible for EAL users through our ongoing internationalization efforts. We've recently finished preparing all emails for translation and are continuing to work on other parts of the site.

Moving Forward

Looking forward to the future, we want to maintain our progress in this area and continue to improve transparency about changes within the OTW. We will make efforts to share information about updates like these in the monthly newsletter and our quarterly public Board meetings on Discord (you can also find updates from our quarterly meetings in our meeting minutes).

We appreciate your ongoing support and patience throughout these efforts, and we offer our sincerest apologies for the extended time required to fulfill our promises. Although progress has been slower than anticipated, we are very excited to share that our major goals are now complete and we are committed to continuing improvement into the future.

The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, OTW Legal Advocacy, and Transformative Works and Cultures. We are a fan-run, donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.

The Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) Board of Directors is saddened to announce that Erica Frank and Kathryn Soderholm have resigned from their roles as Board Directors for personal reasons. Their resignations are effective as of December 11, 2025.

Erica was elected to her seat in 2024, and her term was set to end in 2027; her seat will be filled in the upcoming election as a one-year term. Kathryn was elected to her seat in 2023, and was already scheduled to be replaced in the upcoming election. In the meantime, both of their seats will remain vacant.

We would like to thank Erica and Kathryn for their service as members of the Board and for their years as OTW volunteers. We wish them all the best in their future endeavors.

The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, OTW Legal Advocacy, and Transformative Works and Cultures. We are a fan-run, donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.

Candidates Announcement

The Organization for Transformative Works is pleased to announce the following candidates for the 2025 Election (in alphabetical order by given name):

• C. Ryan S.
• Elizabeth W.
• Harlan L.B.

Because we have 2 seats to be filled and 3 candidates, the 2025 election will be contested – that is, the members of the OTW will vote on which candidates fill the seats. The Elections Committee is excited to introduce the candidates to all of the members of the OTW! Included in this post are links to short Bios and Platforms written by the candidates. This post also marks the beginning of our Q&A period, during which we invite the public to submit questions for the candidates. Additionally, we will be holding a series of live chats – dates and times for those are to be announced based on candidate availability. Information on the voting period and how to vote will also be posted shortly. In the meantime, there is a timeline of Elections events available here for your reference. Read on to learn more about our candidates and how you can submit questions for them!

Platforms and Bios

We asked each candidate to provide us with a Bio that sums up their professional and fannish experience, as well as to write a Platform about their goals for their term on the Board by answering the following questions:

• Why did you decide to run for election to the Board?
• What skills and/or experience would you bring to the Board?
• Choose one or two goals for the OTW that are important to you and that you would be interested in working on during your term. Why do you value these goals? How would you work with others to achieve them?
• What is your experience with the OTW's projects and how would you collaborate with the relevant committees to support and strengthen them? Try to include a range of projects, though feel free to emphasize particular ones you have experience with.
• How would you balance your Board work with other roles in the OTW, or how do you plan to hand over your current roles to focus on Board work?

You can read both the candidates' answers to these questions and their bios by following the links below.

• C. Ryan S.
• Elizabeth W.
• Harlan L.B.

Question & Answer (Q&A)

To better accommodate the time constraints of the election and the workload for candidates, we are asking voters to limit to one question per message. Additional questions in the same message will be discarded. Limit of three questions per person. Anyone may submit questions via the Elections form. Please submit all questions by 11:59pm UTC on June 29 (what time is that where I live?). All candidates will answer each question submitted, subject to the following restrictions:

• Questions must be a maximum of 50 words long.
• Any submitted questions repeating what is already addressed on Platforms will be ignored. This is to allow candidates to dedicate more time to answering new questions.
• Similar questions will be grouped together to avoid candidates giving repetitive answers. Elections volunteers will decide which questions are similar enough to group.
• If you have a follow-up to a Platform question, please specifically mention it is a follow-up so Elections volunteers know not to treat it as a repeat.
• One question per message. Additional questions in the same message will be discarded.
• Maximum of three questions per person.

The posting date for answers will be chosen depending on the number of questions received. Posts will be spread out, arranged by topic, to make it easier for voters to read all the answers.

The Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) Board of Directors is saddened to announce that Zixin Zhang has resigned from her role as a Board Director for personal reasons.

Zixin was elected to her seat in 2023 and her resignation is effective as of the 28th of April, 2025. As her term was set to end in a few months, her seat will be left open until this year's OTW elections and filled via the normal election process.

We would like to thank Zixin for her service as a member of the Board and for her years as an OTW volunteer. We wish her all the best in her future endeavors.

The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, Transformative Works and Cultures, and OTW Legal Advocacy. We are a fan run, entirely donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.

Every month or so the OTW will be doing a Q&A with one of its volunteers about their experiences in the organization. The posts express each volunteer's personal views and do not necessarily reflect the views of the OTW or constitute OTW policy. Today's post is with Anh, who recently became a member of our Board of Directors.

How does what you do as a volunteer fit into what the OTW does?

Disclaimer: since being elected to the OTW Board in the summer of 2023, what I do now in September 2023 is quite different from what I did as an OTW volunteer previously. I imagine it will be an ever-evolving process, even after October.

I am a Fanlore Social Media & Outreach volunteer. Fanlore is an OTW project – a wiki with a mission of fannish history preservation that anyone can easily contribute to, run by fans and for fans. Our Social Media & Outreach team works with our in-house Graphic Designers to promote Fanlore on social media, particularly Tumblr and X/Twitter. I am also an Open Doors Import Assistant, whose tasks revolve around helping Open Doors volunteers with archive imports, such as searching AO3 for duplicate fanworks or manually posting fanworks from an archive backup to AO3.

As I've mentioned before, I'm also one of the newly elected OTW Board members; training for the Board is still ongoing so I'm learning the ropes. From what I've seen so far, Board members take turns handling email duty – making sure that incoming emails are properly categorised and labelled depending on content and urgency – and sometimes we need to vote on certain requests. We also have meetings with committee chairs. The Board typically holds public meetings on Discord four times per year, with one specifically being after the election for Board turnover. At the moment of writing this, we are in the process of setting a date for our October meeting. I'm looking forward to attending, this time as one of the sitting Board members *wink*!

What is a typical week like for you as a volunteer?

For Open Doors, depending on the period, we may receive both urgent and non-urgent tasks. On Sundays, my schedule is usually free enough for me to join one of our work parties – Open Doors folks agree to be online at the same time and chat while doing our tasks. During these parties, folks may ask for help with one thing or another; sometimes it's just all chatting. At other times, I may help with searching for duplicate fanworks on AO3 when I'm available, typically on Monday evenings.

For Fanlore, we have several different rosters and deadlines for dividing tasks amongst volunteers. I often collect all the tasks I need to finish in a week and tackle them all in one or two evenings. In contrast to Open Doors tasks – which I can do sporadically in my free time – I find myself tackling Fanlore tasks more productively if I have a clear objective and deadline.

My typical week as a volunteer since September looks kinda like this, in no particular order:

• Follow policy discussions on the internal chat tool
• "Chat" with my friends about the OTW 🐧
• If my schedule permits, attend the Fanlore meeting – complete some Fanlore tasks; attend one of the Open Doors work parties – complete some Open Doors tasks
• Continue Board training
• Socialise with my OTW friends, and help with tag translation on VoldeChat

What made you decide to volunteer?

I actually mentioned this in one of my candidate posts for the OTW 2023 election. I had wanted to volunteer for the Organisation since 2020, but the positions that interested me often caught me when I was in the middle of something. For example, I skipped at least 4 Tag Wrangling calls for volunteers because I was in the process of: being laid off, moving to the other side of the country, applying for new job(s), or more recently, running for Board!

Then, in 2022, Fanlore's call for volunteers went out, and I really wanted to add OTW volunteering to my resumé. Welp, it all started because I wanted to show off some internet hobbies and volunteering (for a nonprofit founded in 2007 that has always been remote-work-based) on my job application. I also had a vague idea about trying to join the OTW Board of Directors in the future, preferably after one to two years of volunteering, so that I could give back to the Organisation. A letter of reference written with the official OTW letterhead™ signed by committee chairs had sounded cool af for my down-to-earth job application package, because fandom is such a big part of my life. Adding the OTW Board of Directors would have made it certified BAMF.

But life seldom works the way we imagine. Never would I have predicted that my plans would come to fruition so soon, with my original timeline out of the window since May. If my life was a 'time travel ruin-it' fic, I'd go back in time and smack my-2022-naive-self for even thinking that running for the OTW Board of Directors election was 'cool'. Spoiler alert: it’s not, it’s not cool at all.

What has been your biggest challenge doing work for the OTW?

Nightmare. And I don't mean it metaphorically, or rhetorically, or poetically or theoretically or any other fancy way. I had a nightmare about/during the OTW election, no joke. People would tell you that this is just volunteering work: you can commit what you can, how you can, and you can leave whenever if it's too much, et cetera. But my lack of sleep is real, my exhaustion is real, my stressful weeks of watching something I've grown to love go up in flames – as long-standing problems within the Organisation reached a boiling point over the summer – is absolutely real. I've seen fellow volunteers, some of them my friends, share the same suffering. It baffles me that as a registered nonprofit for more than a decade, the OTW still lacks several necessary systems to protect our volunteers.

Again, I'm still learning the ropes around Board work, but I can sense the path to rebuild trust within the Organisation – between volunteers and people in leadership positions, as well as trust from outside user bases and members toward the OTW – is going to take time, effort, and be long and challenging. I also want to echo my previous discussion about Board work and how much a singular Board member can accomplish regarding structural changes within the OTW.

Fortunately, I'm not working alone; there are fellow volunteers and newly elected Board members who are trying to achieve change. I hope that, by being on the Board, I can help inspire and facilitate positive changes, plus maintain discussions and movements surrounding worthy causes, such as the racism issues within the OTW and improvements regarding transparency in both internal and external communication.

What fannish things do you like to do?

My friends often joke about me being a person who enjoys suffering creatively, several times over. I started drawing fanart in primary school, and I posted my first fanfic on a Manga-Anime forum when I was a teenager. I also dipped my toes in fan translation when I was in high school and started learning how to make fanvids/fansubs when I was a freshman in university.

Sadly, procrastination is my best-frenemy, so the only thing I can brag about nowadays is my privated-since-2015ish WordPress blog with nearly 1 million views, where I posted all my fan translations of C-novels and fanfic. I still translate fanworks on occasion, but I'm a byelingual – when you speak (more than) two languages but slowly lose vocabulary in all of them – so I either orphan-ed or anon-ed my translated fanworks on AO3.

I love crossover and crack/rarepairs, so I mostly create fanworks for these out-of-nowhere ships that nobody ships but me and two other people on [insert the social media platforms I use but stay between me and Cthulhu].

I love Fanlore though, especially the part about building and expanding Fanlore articles about my favourite characters and ships, or on very rare occasions – favourite fandoms. One thing I have to confess: I've 'spite-edited' certain article(s) on Fanlore 120+ times because it's about something I love and I want to prop it to the sky and back. Now, I just realised that apparently my flickering self-restraint and my spiteful energy are the two major forces behind my motivation, and sometimes obsession, with certain things, welp.

Also, in case I haven't made myself clear, I obviously love love LOVE reading fanfic. Please shower me with your crackiest crossover/rarepair fic recs, thank you. I and my Cthulhu bookmark keeper will be apocalyptically grateful.

Now that our volunteer’s said five things about what they do, it’s your turn to ask one more thing! Feel free to ask about their work in the comments. Or if you'd like, you can check out earlier Five Things posts.

The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, Transformative Works and Cultures, and OTW Legal Advocacy. We are a fan run, entirely donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.

The Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) is saddened to announce that Antonius Melisse and Natalia Gruber have resigned from the Board of Directors. Antonius's term was already scheduled to end in a few months, with his seat on track to be filled at the end of the current election season. However, Natalia still had two years to her term. Her seat will be added to the number of seats to be filled in the upcoming election.

Because the number of Board vacancies is now the same as the number of candidates, this year's OTW Board election will be uncontested. However, the election will still happen, on August 11 - 14, and OTW members will elect three candidates to serve a full-term (3 years) and two candidates to serve partial terms.

We would like to thank Antonius and Natalia for their service as members of the Board and wish them all the best in their future endeavors.

Edited to add: Board director Alex Tischer has also resigned from the OTW Board effective July 27th.

The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, Transformative Works and Cultures, and OTW Legal Advocacy. We are a fan run, entirely donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.

In 2020, the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) made a commitment to our users, members, and volunteers that we would work towards making our organization and our projects more welcoming and inclusive to fans of color, and preventing and combating racist harassment on our platforms.

Today, we'd like to provide an update on what steps we have taken so far to accomplish those goals, and what still needs to be done. But first, we have a duty to acknowledge that this work hasn't been nearly as prompt as we had hoped, and that the main victims of our delayed progress are the people of color who continue to suffer due to harassment and slow action. In May, fans organized a campaign against racism in the OTW, and we want to take a moment to thank everyone who participated. We hear and appreciate the people who continue to reach out to us, to share their ideas and their concerns, and to hold us accountable.

What We've Done So Far

Since the posting of our original plan in 2020, we have completed or made significant progress on a series of goals to help protect our users and volunteers against harassment:

• We implemented the ability to freeze comment threads and turn off comments on your works entirely, giving you more control to moderate interactions on your AO3 fanworks.
• User muting was introduced to help you avoid encountering works, bookmarks, or comments from specific users when browsing the Archive.
• We have implemented comment blocking to prevent specific logged-in users from commenting on your works entirely.
• You can now opt out of receiving gifts on AO3, as well as opt out of allowing your works to be invited to collections.
• We have improved admin tools to facilitate investigations by our Policy & Abuse team.
• Internally, we have updated our Code of Conduct to make it explicit that discrimination based on caste is not tolerated in the OTW.
• We also implemented methods for volunteers to contact and submit feedback to the Board anonymously by introducing a separate feedback form.

We are still committed to working towards giving you more control over how you experience the Archive going forward. To that end, we will be expanding blocking features to cover more user interactions, and further limiting how guest users can interact with you on the Archive.

What We're Working On

We have been reviewing the Archive's Terms of Service to help the Policy & Abuse team address different types of harassment. This review is still ongoing, but we hope to complete it soon. Once concluded, any planned changes to the Terms of Service will be made available for public comment in a dedicated news post.

Alongside this review, the Policy & Abuse team continues to improve and calibrate their internal policies about harassment and hate speech in icons, user names, and other non-story elements. The team strives to remain vigilant and flexible in order to respond appropriately to new harassment vectors as needed.

Internally, back in 2021 the OTW opened recruitment for a Diversity Consultant Research Officer (DCRO). They began their work in 2022, contacting internal stakeholders and researching firms. The DCRO hopes to finish their internal studies by September, and has already begun to investigate potential contractors.

We will keep you updated on how these projects are progressing. Please continue reading to learn more about how we plan to communicate these updates.

Communications Improvements

One of the areas the OTW has been working to improve in is transparency in communication. We know how important these topics are to our users, and we will be trying to better keep you informed about what we're doing to combat and prevent racism in the OTW and on AO3.

One change we have already implemented is to provide quarterly updates on our diversity work during OTW Board of Directors public meetings. These meetings take place on Discord and can be attended by anyone. There are a few ways you can know when a meeting is coming up:

• Keep an eye on the OTW's Twitter account—every meeting is announced at least one week in advance.
• Join our Discord server—as soon as a meeting is scheduled, a notification will appear in the meeting channel.
• Subscribe to the Board Calendar so that new meetings will show directly on your personal calendar.

Additionally, we will be making an effort to include all information discussed in these meetings in the OTW's monthly newsletter. The newsletter will also provide smaller updates between meetings whenever possible.

We understand how frustrating these delays have been, and we deeply apologize. We remain committed to making our spaces more welcoming and safe for all users. We sincerely thank you for sticking with us as we strive to improve. Your feedback on this and any other matters is welcome and valued, always.

The OTW Board of Directors can be reached for direct feedback and further suggestions via email.

The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, Transformative Works and Cultures, and OTW Legal Advocacy. We are a fan run, entirely donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.

The Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) Board of Directors regrets to announce that Heather McGuire has resigned from her role as a Director. Heather was elected to her seat in 2022 and her resignation is effective as of the 21st of May 2023. Her seat will be filled in the upcoming election.

We would like to thank Heather for her service as a member of the Board and for her years as an OTW volunteer. We wish her all the best in her future endeavors.

The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, Transformative Works and Cultures, and OTW Legal Advocacy. We are a fan run, entirely donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.

The Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) Board of Directors is saddened to announce that Jess White has resigned from her role as a Director for personal reasons. Jess was elected to her seat in 2020 and her resignation is effective as of the 5th of November 2022. As her term was set to end in a few months, her seat will be left open until next year's OTW elections.

We would like to thank Jess for her service as a member of the Board and for her many years as an OTW volunteer. We wish her all the best in her future endeavors.

Since May 3rd, the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) — the nonprofit behind AO3, Fanlore, and other projects — has been dealing with malicious attacks aimed at the organization and its volunteers. We wanted to share with you some of what's been happening, as well as what we're doing to contain it, and how it may affect our response times to your inquiries and our workload in general. Above all, we need to ask for your patience, because these are complicated times for all of us at the OTW.

An unknown attacker has been sending our volunteers threatening emails with illegal child sexual abuse material (CSAM), which has been reported to several law enforcement authorities.

These attacks have not affected AO3 user accounts or accounts on any other OTW projects, or OTW donor data. At this time we have no reason to believe that emails or other private user data whatsoever associated with AO3 or any of our other projects have been exposed to any external bad actors.

We've already alerted the relevant authorities, and we're seeking legal advice on how best to proceed. Protecting our volunteers and safeguarding this investigation is our top priority right now, which means we've shut down a number of internal tools necessary to do our work effectively. This was done to better protect our volunteers from further threats.

As a consequence of this, changes and announcements that had been planned for the next few weeks are likely to be delayed. You can expect delays in response times for all OTW teams. Please note:

• AO3 Tag Wrangling's planned changes for Dream SMP fandoms will be delayed. New tags will not be wrangled until a later time.
• AO3 Support, Open Doors, and Policy & Abuse responses are all likely to take much longer than usual. The same applies to Fanlore teams.
• Responses to queries sent to OTW Legal, including DMCA Takedown Notices, may be delayed.
• OTW donation gifts may be delayed.
• OTW recruitment is suspended until further notice.
• The OTW's social media posting schedule will be reduced for most outlets.

There have been no changes to the following:

• The OTW election timeline will remain unchanged.
• AO3 invitations for new users are being sent out normally.

Please be patient with us at this time. We are trying our best to keep our projects running as smoothly as possible while also keeping our volunteers — without whom none of these projects would exist — safe. Thank you so much for your understanding and support.

(One final note: we've disabled comments on all our news posts for the time being for security reasons. If you need to get in touch with us, please use the Support and Feedback form, but bear in mind that responses will likely be delayed.)

In recent weeks, there have been intense conversations about long-standing issues with racism in fandom, as well as the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) and Archive of Our Own (AO3)'s roles in this problem. We have received valid criticism for not showing our commitment earlier and numerous requests to clarify our position. We would therefore like to take a moment to address our users and fandom at large.

The OTW stands against racism and discrimination in all its forms. We apologize to anyone who has suffered from our inaction in making the OTW and AO3 a better environment for Black fans and fans of color. And we apologize especially to users who, due to this very inaction, have felt unwelcome on AO3. We also apologize to the scholars whose work we cited out of context, leading to their harassment and distress.

We have heard your voices and feedback; we vow to do better in the future, as outlined in our initial response plan below.

Upcoming AO3 changes

AO3 was designed specifically with maximum inclusivity of content in mind, and we remain committed to that principle. When it comes to which fanworks are allowed on AO3, there will always be significant tension between maximum inclusivity of content and making the Archive a welcoming space for all fans.

We can, however, do a better job of helping users curate their own experience on AO3 and avoid works they do not wish to see. We can also implement more tools to prevent and combat harassment. In the coming months, we plan to prioritize our ongoing work on several changes to give users greater control of their AO3 experience:

• Providing work creators more control over comments on their works by offering the ability to freeze specific comment threads or turn off comments entirely. The option to turn off comments will be on the posting and editing forms for individual works and on the Edit Multiple Works page, alongside the existing options to turn off guest comments and/or turn on comment moderation.
• Improving collection searching and filtering to make searching collections by fandom return collections that include bookmarks in the specified fandom. This will help users build and locate curated spaces within AO3 using the collections feature.
• Improving admin tools behind the scenes to facilitate investigations by our Policy & Abuse team.
• Reviewing our Terms of Service and potentially drafting revisions that will allow our Policy & Abuse team to address different types of harassment not covered under the current Terms of Service.
• Reassessing current warnings and discussing the possibility of implementing others in the future. This is an extremely complex issue in terms of definition, implementation, and sustainable enforcement. It is not one that will be quickly or easily addressed, but we are discussing all possibilities in detail.
• We will also continue our design work on additional features like user muting and blocking and explore other possibilities like saved searches to filter out certain works, tag muting, or taking user-added bookmark tags into account with filtering.

The above list is by no means comprehensive—we are committed to continuing to develop features that will improve our users' experience of the Archive and put them in control.

Upcoming OTW changes

Ongoing conversations have brought to light a need for us to reconsider the way we recognize and deal with issues that some of our volunteers may experience. To ensure that all voices are heard, we have opened new channels to allow for more open, honest feedback from our volunteers, and will use this feedback to identify areas in which the OTW most urgently needs to do better.

From this, we hope to build a long-term strategy that will include specific internal goals and structural improvements, which can be further divided into clear, actionable steps that we can incorporate into our upcoming Strategic Plan. As part of this, we will be considering various avenues including, but not limited to, reaching out to an external contractor or partnering with an advocacy group, and will be actively researching credible resources in the coming months.

We recognize that this careful approach will take time as we need to make sure any steps are taken responsibly and with a clear scope and objective, while also keeping up with the other duties and obligations of OTW governance. However, we believe that it is an important step to take in creating a stronger OTW for all.

Next steps

We realize that these issues and ideas are not new. We have heard these criticisms before and failed to meet many fans' expectations. We also understand that these measures are only small steps. Unfortunately, this is a complex issue with no easy answers and no simple solutions. This means that it isn't something we can fix with funding alone. We must be mindful when implementing any features or policies to consider their ramifications carefully, so that changes do not end up compounding existing problems.

Even in cases where we can't meet particular requests due to practical considerations, we will listen and consider them, and assess whether we can accomplish the same goals via other means.

We once again apologize for our shortcomings and remain, as always, open to hearing from you. We would like to offer our sincere thanks to all those who have taken the time to discuss this issue and contact us about it, and we welcome all feedback, now and always. The OTW is made by fans for fans, and we are always open to hearing fans' thoughts on what we're doing and how we could do better.

The OTW Board of Directors
OTW Chairs & Leads

The OTW Board of Directors can be reached for direct feedback and further suggestions via email.

Every month or so the OTW will be doing a Q&A with one of its volunteers about their experiences in the organization. The posts express each volunteer's personal views and do not necessarily reflect the views of the OTW or constitute OTW policy. Today's post is with Jessie Casiulis, who volunteers as a member of the Board of Directors.

How does what you do as a volunteer fit into what the OTW does?

I currently have three hats in the OTW: Board Director, Translation Staff, and Volunteer Tag Wrangler.

On the Board of Directors, my role is to help run the Organization. My fellow directors and I approve projects, make financial decisions, and ensure the OTW's compliance with legal obligations. We also work hand-in-hand with committees and chairs, to support them through their day-to-day work and to plan for the Organization's long-term goals.

As Translation staff, I mostly do volunteer management, with a side of document handling. Translation staffers assign tasks, handle hiatus requests, run interviews, check-ins, and training chats, and generally provide all kinds of help for translators. We also proof-read documents for translatability and coordinate updates when previously translated documents get modified.

Last but not least, as a Tag Wrangler, I contribute to ensuring that tags are properly sorted and hooked, so that AO3 users can use our search filters accurately and efficiently.

What is a typical week like for you as a volunteer?

There’s no real typical week for me as a volunteer: different weeks provide different challenges depending on the workload I have for each committee. I usually work a couple of hours each day, but my hours go wild occasionally. If there’s a fire to deal with, none of us count our hours until the problem we have is solved. Similarly, time-intensive events, such as recruitment or check-ins, will see me glued to my computer a lot more often, be it because of meetings, note-taking, or general information monitoring. Not to mention on-call weeks for Translation.

It can be tiring at times, but everyone tries to be really considerate of everyone else. We support each other through difficult weeks, and try to keep an eye out for potential burn-outs. No one will ever make you feel bad for asking for help, or for needing a week off occasionally.

Board members hold the only elected positions in the OTW. What made you decide to run?

People! Being in the OTW means being part of a community of people who uplift you and help you see the best in you, be it with praise, constructive criticism, or good-natured ribbing. I was interested in Board work, but I was on the bench about running. The people I spoke to about it convinced me to try, and supported me through the election process. Without them I don’t think I would have had the confidence to run.

Board members have to have volunteered in the OTW for some time before they can serve on the board. What are some of the things you’ve worked on before in the OTW?

I started in the OTW as a French translator. I joined up at the same time as some super-energetic and invested peeps who are still in the OTW, being awesome humans. Together, we had a lot of fun updating French policies, reviewing translations, and translating often challenging documents.

Then, I joined the Support Committee where I helped AO3 users with technical issues, answered their questions, and forwarded their feedback to the relevant committees. My inner tinkerer was happy to discover the scaffolding behind AO3, and all of its lesser-known features. I encourage anyone with an interest in the tech parts of AO3 and an interest in customer service to apply to Support!

And finally, I was already a tag wrangler when I joined Board.

What fannish things do you like to do?

What fannish things don’t I like to do? I write and read -- which reminds me that I should write more if I ever hope to finish my current WIP. I draw badly, and craft even worse, but I always enjoy it. I sometimes cosplay. I DM homebrew versions of role-playing games set in my players’ and my favorite universes, and moderate some Discord servers. Honestly, I don’t think I’ve come across a fannish activity I didn’t enjoy... including sports, as my combat-ready lightsabers can attest to.

Now that our volunteer’s said five things about what they do, it’s your turn to ask one more thing! Feel free to ask about their work in comments. Or if you'd like, you can check out earlier Five Things posts.

The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, Transformative Works and Cultures, and OTW Legal Advocacy. We are a fan run, entirely donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.

Michele Tepper’s contribution is the final post in our series celebrating 10 years since the launch of the Archive of Our Own. Michele was a founding member of the OTW and helped create much of AO3’s “look” in her role as head of design in the early days. Her contribution provides a nice conclusion to the series, emphasizing the importance of working together in order to make such a big project a success.

I got involved with the OTW because I knew some of the other founders already. I had designed a discussion board for Buffy fans (buffistas.org) a few years earlier, and so I had an understanding of the challenges of working with a remote team of volunteers on a project for a fan community. Also, I was working for a digital product design studio, where I saw the wave of commercialization around "user-generated content", and I liked the idea of doing something that helped keep transformative works in the hands of the creators. So I told Naomi Novik I was interested in helping out, and that's how I ended up as a founding board member for the OTW!

What I remember most about the early days of the Archive was the collaboration. Naomi, cmshaw, and I spent long hours coming up with the core functions of the archive; technologists and user experience designer collaborating to find the best solution. We built out a roadmap that saw the Archive through its earliest years, as well as an experience that people point to as exceptional, and I'm proud of that.

My favorite thing about AO3 is the tagging and the tag wranglers. I have the tag page for "feels" as a bookmark on my phone, and when I need an emotional boost, I go and look at all the different ways people have tagged for feels, all listed out and merged by the wranglers. It makes me ridiculously happy every time.

I don't pretend to know what the OTW's future will be, because I couldn't have predicted its past! Fanworks are much more accepted in the mainstream than they were 10 years ago, and the OTW and the Archive are a big part of the reason why.

So that’s all for our series from behind the scenes at the AO3. We are so appreciative of all our contributors, as well as the other volunteers who have been working hard since the OTW was founded to make the Archive a haven for fanworks of all types. We agree with Michele that fanworks and fan culture are much more widely accepted than they were 10 years ago and we are proud to think that the OTW and the AO3 have contributed to that. Cheers to 10 years of AO3!

We're beginning our 10th anniversary celebration series about the AO3 by hearing from Francesca Coppa. Francesca is a founding member of the OTW and its longest-running board member (serving for five years). She is still with the OTW today.

Francesca was very enthusiastic about contributing to this series! Here’s what she had to say:

I have been in school nearly all my life and the OTW has been, hands down, the best school I ever went to: like they say, “everything I really needed to know I learned in the OTW!” I have such fond memories of those early days in the summer of 2007, after the call for an Archive of Our Own. The meetings lasted for hours! Naomi Novik and Michele Tepper were evaluating technological tools and drawing up user experience blueprints, and Rebecca Tushnet and Susan Gibel were working on our nonprofit paperwork and creating the legal and institutional structures governing our existence. (I think Susan is the unsung hero of the early OTW.)

Meanwhile, I was organizing our volunteers into committees. We'd asked those who were “Willing to Serve” to tell us about their skills and interests, and it was the most impressive and moving thing: we had lawyers, coders, public relations professionals, database analysts, professional fundraisers, sysadmins, journalists, management consultants, accountants, and technical writers; just so much expertise and so many kinds of expertise, and all of it offered to us out of love.

That is the thing that stays with me, and the thing I think most about now: that the OTW and the AO3 are about the collective, the network of fandom with its strong ties (“I would die for you”) and its looser ties (“Hey, we were in a fandom together once”), and then just the ties of shared identity (“you have once loved a thing as I have loved a thing!”) that make us recognize each other when we see a t-shirt, a sticker or an open tab. All of us are pulling together toward a common goal. We are what the web was meant to be: a network of people coming together to build something and keep it going.

Every month or so the OTW will be doing a Q&A with one of its volunteers about their experiences in the organization. The posts express each volunteer's personal views and do not necessarily reflect the views of the OTW or constitute OTW policy. Today's post is with Claire Baker, who volunteers as a member of the OTW Board.

How does what you do as a volunteer fit into what the OTW does?

The OTW's current Board members tend to wear many hats, and I am no exception. I co-chair the AO3 Documentation Committee (call us Docs!), wrangle tags in a handful of fandoms, do layout editing for Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC), and also serve on our Board of Directors.

Docs and Tag Wrangling are both AO3 committees: Docs writes FAQs, tutorials, and other user-facing help documentation, and Tag Wrangling sorts the tags users put on their works so that all the works about the same topic (fandom, character, pairing, etc) can be easily found. With TWC, I'm on the production team: my job is to take articles that have been written and copyedited, and add html formatting.

The Board of Directors oversees everything, though this oversight works best when we have direct communication with those who will be affected by our work. As such, we end up meeting either synchronously or asynchronously with chairs and committee members on a regular basis. We're aiming to build strong connections between us and each part of the OTW. And if we're not, I hope the committees can lead us to understand how we better can do our job!

What is a typical week like for you as a volunteer?

Like many people say in these Five Things posts, there's no such thing as a typical week within the OTW. However, I do have a schedule that I like to follow when I can.

I often try to start my OTW day with some tag wrangling. This may involve sorting through new tags, spreadsheeting older ones, or double-checking that canonical tags for my fandoms are all in order.

After that, I'll do some work for Docs. As a chair, this usually means looking at AO3 FAQs or tutorials that have recently been drafted, or documents that have completed our editing cycle and are almost ready for upload. Ideally, I'd look at one or more of these a day, but generally it's a little less than that. We chairs rotate between regular administrative tasks, so I may also send out our weekly check-in or a reminder to our sister committees that works are open for external betaing. Chairs attempt to meet weekly and talk asynchronously around that, so in a typical week I've been in contact with both of my co-chairs, and we've likely discussed or done work on a bigger administrative task as well.

If TWC has a new issue coming up, I'll spend a couple of days applying html to articles in order to get them publication ready, but that's not necessarily in a typical week; my job is only needed a couple of times per year.

And then there's my Board work. The most regular part here is voting. As soon as a request comes in, we will look into the issue, discuss it as needed, and vote. Voting happens asynchronously, and we are usually able to respond within 48 hours. Meetings are very much of a Board reality, and so chances are that I've scheduled or am scheduling one during any given week. (And on the weeks when Board does not meet, I will likely have a meeting scheduled with one of my other committees.) Outside of that, I try to put in an hour on Board documentation somewhere in my day—either looking over existing pages, or drafting missing documentation. I've still got a lot to learn, but I'll keep on studying, asking questions, and working with others to build a deeper understanding for myself, and hopefully a better OTW for everyone.

Board members hold the only elected positions in the OTW. What made you decide to run?

The short answer is that I'm a nerd who loves the OTW and wants to see it become the best it can be. The long answer's a little more complicated, if no less heartfelt.

I fell in love with the concept of the OTW the moment that I was introduced to it in 2012. I fell in love with the people when I started volunteering in 2014. I was happy to do various tasks and to lend an opinion when needed, and I built a reputation of being a good person with strong leadership skills somewhere along the line. Meanwhile, I was witnessing transition: Docs went from a workgroup to a committee, the OTW adopted a new internal communication platform, and the Board itself went through a changing of the guard. Through all of that, I learned how great (and complicated) the OTW could be, and how much I valued it as a place of work.

By 2017, I was the third-longest serving member in Docs, and had gained a breadth of experience through mentoring new staff, taking on new roles within the OTW, and generally being an active participant in our volunteer community. When Elections and the Board started running opportunities to learn more about candidacy, I found myself participating there too.

In all honesty, I originally expected to wait one more year to have that much more knowledge under my belt, and so I could run alongside a friend who didn't quite qualify for candidacy. However, there was a need for more candidates for a fair, contested election, and I knew I had the time and skill set needed to serve the OTW well, so I put my name up for consideration.

Now, I wouldn't take back that decision for anything. I work alongside people I think of as great role models, and learn more from them every time we talk. I've gained a lot of knowledge about the OTW as a whole as well, and really do enjoy both the joys and challenges that come with helping the entire organization move forward smoothly. My hope now is that I can help foster the next generation of people to join our ranks, whether as new volunteers or new board members, and make the OTW an even better place for the fan community at large.

What are things you think fans probably do and don't understand about the OTW Board?

When I was new to the OTW, there was a lot of wariness about Board, and a pretty strong Them vs. Us mentality. We're working on breaking this down, but it takes a lot of time and effort to build, earn, and maintain trust.

The Board exists to make sure that we're all on the same page, and that we're doing what we need to still be around for years to come. If there's something coming up that we need to be prepared for, like GDPR, we'll make sure that the necessary conversations are happening. If AO3 needs more servers, we're here to make sure that those needs are acknowledged and met. Otherwise, we're happy to talk about our favourite characters and ships and take part in a wide variety of fannish activities, just like everyone else here.

What fannish things do you like to do?

I'm a cosplayer. I entered competitions in my first few years of cosplay, and won an award or two, but have since found that I prefer doing it a little more casually. I also run panels at conventions, and often end up coordinating panel and cosplay schedules alike for the group that I'll be attending with. Really, there's nothing better than spending a weekend with your friends, talking about your favourite fandoms while you're all dressed as characters from them. It's a lot of fun, and well worth the effort.

I also write fanfic and RP, and love sharing headcanons with my friends. Somehow this led to becoming a regular beta for a few of them, which I love. Being able to look at their works before anyone else is an absolute treat, and if I can help make their works stronger before they're published, all the better.

Most of my writing these days is for gift exchanges. I have a habit of running three or four small gift exchanges simultaneously, and participating in several more. I'm also a serial pinch hitter, and will do my best to make sure everyone has something to look forward to when gifts are revealed.

My other love is for the academic side of fandom. I'm building up a small library of books related to the subject, and would love to get a Masters or PhD in fan studies one day. In the meantime, I'm enjoying my time as an independent scholar.

Now that our volunteer’s said five things about what they do, it’s your turn to ask one more thing! Feel free to ask about their work in comments. Or if you'd like, you can check out earlier Five Things posts.

The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, Transformative Works and Cultures, and OTW Legal Advocacy. We are a fan run, entirely donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.

Every month or so the OTW will be doing a Q&A with one of its volunteers about their experiences in the organization. The posts express each volunteer's personal views and do not necessarily reflect the views of the OTW or constitute OTW policy.

As part of our 10th anniversary celebrations, we have a special retrospective Five Things this month. Today's post is with Naomi Novik, one of the founders of the OTW, a past board member, and a current staffer with the Accessibility, Design, & Technology Committee. The following is an interview transcript which has been edited for length and clarity.

What was the first year of the OTW like? What do you remember most from it?

I don't remember the high points as well, I find that over time what I remember are the problems. In the beginning there was a lot of work we had to do to reassure people about what we were trying to do, such as that they weren't going to get into [legal] trouble, that there would be ways to give people control over their stories. The other piece that first year is that some people expected to see something 5 minutes after we formed! You know, where is the Archive? But it all takes time, there were a lot of growing pains you have when you're putting things together from scratch that the OTW has been left with. But my philosophy is to do the thing if you have the momentum, and it's better to have done something that was not perfect than to not have anything done at all.

There were certain ways in which a sustainable organization doesn't work on passion, at the same time that you want to be able to harness passion. I think we were struggling a bit with how to get an organization running but at the same time have it grow. A lot of the details are gone for me now -- I have a terrible memory for this sort of thing because once something is no longer my problem, I forget about it, it's just gone.

One example is figuring out Communications and what it was going to be like [for the OTW and as a committee]. [The early volunteers] were all on LiveJournal, and so regarding communications I thought that it would be just the newsletters we have, and then people from the organization posting on their journals and talking to other fans on an individual level. And it didn't work very well, and I wasn't involved myself, but I remember frustration that we weren't being very successful at doing what we wanted to do there.

I was more involved on the technical level, which we had plenty of disagreements about too. Because the question was do you design it first, to have everything the way you want it, and then you build it or do you just start building? And I feel very very strongly that we ended up doing it the right way. We really did just dive in and start building. Overall, I'm quite happy with the success of that strategy, and then later, we know it's imperfect and there's things it doesn't do, so that unfortunately you haven't served everyone as well as you could have. It's a trade-off to having an archive.

I do think, fundamentally, it was the right call, and we are not, by far, the first organization that had to make that call. There are many different ways to make that call and we could have done it in a better way. Now the cost of that strategy has to be paid over a long time. But what matters most to me is that we made something. And the work is being done to get it to a sustainable place. At the beginning there was a very propulsive sort of drive to establish something and to get it running.

What do you see as the major turning points of the OTW during its ten years?

We had a huge advantage at the beginning, which is that we started with a small group of people who mostly all knew one another. Me, [current OTW Legal staffer] Rebecca Tushnet and [current Transformative Works & Cultures staffer] Francesca Coppa knew each other, and the other first Board members were in relatively close geographical proximity to one another, so we could get together face to face and discuss things. That was a big help. But we also had enormous expertise in the early group -- legal, academic, pro writing, technical experts. The people on the first board were the lynch pins of their respective committees. So it was a small group that could work together closely and develop things quickly in their own areas.

For a while in the middle of the OTW's growth we fell away from that. Being on the Board is a tough job and it takes an enormous amount of time to do the work well. I have done it well and have also done it poorly. It's not entirely, but is largely, based on how much time you have to offer, as well as the people you work with, and whether you can communicate with them effectively and whether there's a level of personal trust among you.

I feel there was a terrible low point that we went through. There was a middle wave; there's been research done on this process among non-profits that shows that what the OTW went through is a common pattern. There is a visionary founder, or team of founders, who bite off much more than they can do. That approach leaves a lot of loose ends. The people who are then recruited and pulled in because of the vision that the founders established see the problems with what was done or with what is happening, but they feel frustrated because they may not have the access to the founders or to ways of solving the problem. So then things turn antagonistic on either a personal or organizational level. So the OTW then had lots of people running for the Board being against what was happening to the Board.

So while things aren't going well and the Board isn't doing everything great, at the same time the people on the Board know a lot about what's going on in the organization because there have already been discussions and arguments that led up to that point, they've been there, and know the reasons for why things are happening. But there's no trust anymore and the Board as a group has gotten dysfunctional. And we have had several dysfunctional Boards.

Then you have the third wave who are happy doing their thing within the OTW and don't necessarily want to be on the Board. But they've seen the problems, they've come up in the organization and have seen what is going on at the top. And even though they'd rather just be able to keep doing the work that they've been doing, they feel they have to step up and fix this situation we've found ourselves in. That's the kind of Board we have now, and that's a good place. The OTW got through those growing pains, which is important because there are a lot of organizations who don't make it through that period, through those transitions.

In the beginning the contrast was, we had lots of disagreements but it was a foundation when everyone knew each other and respected each other's skills and knew of one another before ending up on the Board. That can be good but it also creates insularity. Those first few years were about just vrooom -- anything you wanted to try, you just tried. There wasn't anything that stopped you. There was nothing there yet so you just created something.

So in the beginning you didn't have people already doing things a certain way that then would all have to be changed -- you can't do that to people and disrupt their work and processes in that way. Especially on the coding side, that's an enormously creative period in the beginning where you're just creating. And in general, many people like to build new things and do not like to maintain old things, technology-wise. So at the beginning it's much easier. We all got our hands dirty. None of us had ever worked on anything the scale of what the OTW is now and we were just figuring it all out. For some people it is stressful having to start something, but for others it also is to maintain and grow it.

During your time with the OTW, what have you personally achieved that you feel the most proud of?

The Archive of Our Own is there, just, it exists. On a meta level, when I first made the post about building an archive, I wasn't thinking of it as something I would do. I even said it was something we needed and if someone else would do it then I would help them. But then I saw that no one was volunteering, and I had a moment, I remember this moment, knowing that setting this project in motion would be an enormous time sink, and an emotional sink, and that it would have opportunity costs for the rest of my life. But I did it anyway.

That original discussion generated a certain momentum, and we needed to build on it right away. There's one moment when you can take an idea to the table, and if you miss it, it's going to collapse, it's not going to be a thing at all. At the time I made that post I did it because I was mad and I believed it, I believed we had to do something. It's that whole cliche 'You have to be the change you want to see in the world.' And so I went to Rebecca and Francesca and said 'we're going to do it, but I can't do this without you.' And they said 'alright, we're in.' We'd had conversations before about the problems we wanted the OTW to address and this was the time to do something.

What do you see as the role of the OTW now and do you think that's changed since it began? How might it change in the next 10 years?

The #1 thing that I feel like the OTW has now that it didn't at the very beginning was the role of maintaining things, such as keeping the AO3 up and functioning. And now the Archive, and Fanlore too, but Fanlore is much easier to keep up. It's not easier to grow it, but just to keep it from falling down it's easier. Even the AO3 is hard to grow over the next 10 years just because you need to bring it up to a modern technical level. There should be discussions going on, and I expect there are, about version 2.0 of the Archive. But the AO3 should not look the same 10 years from now, and we need to start thinking about that plan [of how to get there] now rather than later.

We took a responsibility on and I know that -- even during the darkest moments of the Board where I literally thought that the entire tech staff would quit and there would be no one to run AO3 -- that what kept people on [as volunteers] even though there wasn't any kind of good resolution to the problems, it was the inertia of not wanting to drop the ball. There can come a time where there can be too high a personal cost in continuing to work on our projects, but if it requires me [personally] to keep working on it then it's not going to survive anyway. I could not be the one responsible at that stage of my life to continue the maintenance and development of what we had started. I had a small child, my life was changing. And I actually had tried to have conversations with the Board, which was difficult, that if you don't trust the staff to know what to do and to have the room to make those things happen then the project isn't going to survive. There's just a few people keeping it up, and there still are only a few people doing that work, but now there are contractors involved to help move us forward and a process for making the Archive more maintainable.

We all need to gracefully agree and also gracefully fail. And there can be a day when the lights don't come on. There could be a day when we can't afford to keep it running but we keep the stories available for download and provide the data so that someone else can take it on. It's the same thing that Open Doors is trying to save us from, that there are sites that just shut their doors, bye, all your work's gone. [The website] iMeem did that to [fans who were] vidding. Just one day, oh we're not going to host vids anymore. I feel very strongly that we have an obligation not to do that, that's the mission, that the #1 thing the OTW has to do. And I feel that it's happening [that we're keeping things going and maintaing them] so I'm happy with that.

I also feel that legally we're in a better place than we were which is great, and I'm really proud of everything that the Legal Advocacy team has accomplished. It's been amazing to see their victories. I feel like the OTW has done a good job of preserving things too through Open Doors, that's something I'd like to see more focus on, preservation work. But the major thing to work on is also the next generation. Fandom is much larger now than it used to be so we don't need to get everybody, to have the OTW be something to every fan out there. But you do need to be in a place where the kids are at, there's not enough engagement with Wattpad for example. So I think we have people come to the Archive and want and expect things of it, and then go away without quite understanding what it's supposed to be.

One thing I don't want the OTW to do is to try and become hip and trendy and reinvent ourselves in order to try and do that. We want to be the library, the boring place but the one that everyone knows about, and it's there if you need it.

What has been the most fun thing to you about volunteering for the OTW?

Building the AO3. I love coding, I think it's enormously fun, just building and coding something. I love that, that's the best.

Now that one of our founders has said five things about what they've done, it’s your turn to add one more thing! How long have you known about the OTW? Do you use the different projects? How long have you been in fandom?

You can also check out earlier Five Things posts by some of our other volunteers.

The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, Transformative Works and Cultures, and OTW Legal Advocacy. We are a fan run, entirely donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.

The OTW Board of Directors has approved changes to the Archive of Our Own’s Terms of Service and Frequently Asked Questions. Proposed additions in bold; bracketed to be deleted.

This post marks the start of a two-week public comment period. Your comments and questions will be reviewed in order to evaluate whether further changes need to be made.

Thank you for your assistance.

III. Archive Privacy Policy

…

E. What we will do:

1. We may collect personally identifying information when you register for a user account with the Archive, visit any of the Archive sites, or use any of the Archive services. We may use third-party services to store, process, or transmit data, or perform other technical functions related to operating the site. These services may include spam detectors, backup services, icon hosting, and e-mail services. We endeavor to use only services with comprehensive privacy policies but cannot guarantee their performance. We or the services we use may store or process your personally identifying information in data centers which may be located in the United States or other countries.

2. We will use your e-mail address internally, and if you make it public on the site, anyone can access it and use it for any purpose. We may occasionally send e-mails to you from the Archive. We reserve the right to send you notice of complaints or violations [or suspensions] of the Terms of Service, as well as to reply to any e-mail message you send to the Archive.

3. We may retain:

a. the e-mail addresses of those who communicate with us via e-mail;
b. user-specific information about what pages users access or visit;
c. the IP address of each visitor to our sites;
d. any information that a person sends to OTW or Archive e-mail addresses (i.e., any e-mail to an administrator or other official address).

….

V. Assorted Policies

A. Collections, Challenges, and Exchanges

Archive users may create collections and encourage other users to submit fanworks to those collections. The collection maintainer can set any constraints they want on the collection, including rules about anonymous works (see A.4 below) but must otherwise follow the content policy (e.g., if the collection content is explicit, it should be marked as “explicit” or “choose not to rate”). The collection maintainer may be able to ask users for suggestions for new fanworks (“prompts”), collect prompts, match participants with prompts (including contacting them via the contact information provided to the Archive or to the collection maintainer), and show the prompts on the Archive, following the general rules governing works on the Archive. Where collection rules allow, prompts may be anonymous or limited-visibility, as detailed in A.4 and A.5 below.

A challenge maintainer can communicate with challenge participants. The challenge maintainer may have access to participants’ email addresses for this purpose.

FAQ:

Assorted Specialized Policies

Collections

What do you mean by "collections"?

Collections are groups of works collected together under one heading. Collections can be fic or art fests, exchanges, 'big bangs' matching artists, authors, and/or podficcers, or other types of creative challenges, as well as simple collections of fanworks chosen by the collection maintainer. Learn more about collections.

What information can the collection/challenge maintainer see about participants?

The maintainer can see prompts as well as the username and email address that participants use to sign up, in case the maintainer needs to communicate with participants.

What's the point of having separate rules for collections/challenges?

The rules are basically the same as for everything else on the Archive. This just allows another way to group fanworks by areas of interest. There is one important special rule: if the collection maintainer says in the rules that submissions are final, then you can't withdraw your contribution from the collection, though you can always orphan it. We put this rule in place to allow gift exchanges. Ordinarily, removing a fanwork from the Archive is sad, but it's up to you. But when you've added a fanwork as a gift, and possibly received a fanwork as a gift in return, we think it's fair to say that the other participants should continue to enjoy the benefit of your contribution. In those cases, orphaning allows you to sever your connection with the fanwork while not removing it from the collection. This policy was based on prior experience with the Yuletide Rare Fandoms gift exchange.

I think my fanwork would be perfect for a collection, but the maintainer won't add it to the collection!

Unless there's an independent violation of the Content Policy, we won't intervene in collection decisions, even if they are arbitrary, biased, or wrong. You may want to add tags to your fanwork that will be of interest to people who are fans of relevant collections.

How can I start a collection?

Please consult our Tutorials. Please note that participants may provide information to the maintainer for purposes of participating in a collection or challenge. Any use of this information other than to manage the collection or challenge is a violation of our Terms of Service and can result in the termination of the maintainer's account.

Other Changes

Can orphaning be reversed?

Usually not. [If you orphan a work inadvertently, or wish to rewrite it and repost under your name, and you can verify your identity as the author in a way we consider reliable enough, we may be able to reverse the orphaning. But orphaning may be irreversible in some cases,] Orphaning is irreversible in most cases, so please use this option carefully.

What if what I want to post isn’t similar to one of the examples listed in the Terms of Service FAQ?

In general, you can post any non-ephemeral, transformative content that is fannish in nature. If you have doubts about any particular examples and you don’t want to risk posting it, you can always contact our [Support] Abuse team to ask, using the [Support] Abuse form.

There has been a very active and thoughtful response to our recent announcement in favor of allowing meta on the AO3. We'd like to take this opportunity to express our gratitude to everyone for raising their concerns, showing their support, and otherwise engaging with us as we work to define our policies, refine our processes, and improve our communication. In addition, we'd like to respond to a number of the issues raised and clarify how this decision was reached and what the process will be from this point forward.

For the purposes of this and the previous post, the term "meta" refers to nonfictional fanworks in all media. While text-based nonfiction fanworks have been a frequent focus, this decision and the surrounding commentary is meant to encompass fanworks in all media; this is one reason why multimedia hosting, posting, and filtering will be referenced frequently in conjunction with the decision to support meta.

There is still a long way to go before meta can be fully supported on the AO3, and we will address a number of the concerns about implementation and timing below. Determining how meta should be supported — for example, the details of how multimedia hosting on the AO3 will ultimately look — is a matter for our committees and users to decide through committee collaboration and user input. However, determining whether supporting meta on the Archive is consonant with the OTW’s mission falls squarely within the Board’s purview and duty.

History of the discussion

When the initial question of meta was posed to Board, it was framed as a request for clarification on whether meta fell under transformative works as we defined them for the AO3, and how to proceed with reports of meta as a violation of our Terms of Service (ToS). The Board voted last August to send the meta issue back to the committees for more discussion, in the hope that the committees could work out among themselves issues that the Board had found insoluble. The decision called for balancing the competing concerns of several committees, and the Board had been unable to reach a satisfactory agreement. However, the execution of that plan dragged on for months as we dealt with Board member hiatuses, resignations, and appointments on top of other day-to-day business, and the vote was never put into action.

When the Board reconvened in 2013, we initially had intended to continue with the plan set out by the 2012 Board, but we quickly realized that — partly as a result of the Board’s dramatically changed composition and partly because of a new focus on clarifying the Board's purview — we no longer felt it to be the best course of action. We looked at the conversations that had been happening within and outside the organization for the previous six months and came to the conclusion that it was in the best interests of both our users and our personnel that a basic decision be made as soon as possible, rather than occupy staff and volunteer time in further stretching out a question that we felt it was our responsibility as Board to settle: the question of the scope of the OTW and AO3's missions with respect to meta.

We had many users who had been waiting all that time to find out if their meta could stay on the Archive, and several committees who needed a determination in order to perform their duties. We took a fresh vote, which was unanimously in favor of interpreting the OTW and AO3's missions as inclusive of owing meta the same protections and support as other fanworks. Once that vote had been taken, sending the issue back to committees for a discussion that would not have changed the Board’s stance would have been disingenuous. We felt it was preferable to state a firm decision and engage the committees in determining how best to carry it out.

We are aware that the Board's decision seemed very abrupt to people both inside and outside the OTW, and we acknowledge that more transparency would have been preferable. The Board’s overall workload and the emotional burnout many of us have experienced as a result of the length and intensity of the meta discussion were obstacles that prevented us from communicating effectively. We regret our shortcomings in this area and will strive to do better in the future; we are working to reduce workload and burnout and clarify policies and purview in an effort to prevent this from recurring.

We are committed to fully engaging committees and users in determining how the decision will be implemented, and a revised Archive TOS and FAQ are currently being drafted under the leadership of the Content Policy Workgroup. As with other TOS and FAQ revisions, they will be posted for public comment before they are formally adopted.

Replies to some questions and concerns

We recognize that this decision will not be popular with all users, members, or even OTW personnel. Conversely, the choice to allow meta — and turning over the ability to define and craft specific policy to our committees — is a decision many support. The concerns raised by those leaving comments are ones the Board spent a great deal of time discussing, and we are happy to share our reasoning and to continue answering questions to the best of our ability. Here are some responses to common concerns and questions:

• Meta does not require new code to be hosted in its bare form — unlike image or video hosting no new code is required for a basic level of service. For example, a nonfiction essay can be uploaded just like a fictional story, or a meta comic can be linked just like a fictional one is now, or a vid focused on commenting on the canon can be embedded like vids that build fictional narratives currently are. While there are ways the AO3 could be better organized to deliver meta, a basic level of hosting is already available.
• The AO3 is intended to eventually have filtering based on work type/medium, allowing meta to be found and filtered. The intention is to expand the AO3 functionality to better host non-textual fanworks (e.g. vids, podfics, art, etc.), and the most-requested behaviors with respect to meta (filtering, tagging, etc.) all intersect with what will be in place for multimedia hosting and posting.
• Refusing to host meta and waiting until we have sufficient code for works types would unduly punish users who have already posted meta works in good faith. In addition to posting meta based on good-faith interpretation of the TOS, users have been posting many types of works the AO3 is not strictly prepared to deal with on a technical and usability level, which includes meta of all media and most non-textual fanworks. Allowing and encouraging users to post all types of fanworks has been a cornerstone of the AO3's philosophy as an archive, and it would be disingenuous and unfair to punish one type of fanwork or creator but not others on this basis.
• While text-based meta faces much less legal challenge than some other fanwork types, it still faces other challenges such as loss of hosting due to failing archives or discontinued blogging platforms. Non-text-based meta, such as meta art and vids, shares many of the same legal challenges as other non-text-based fanworks.
• Fans should be able to archive all their fanworks together. Besides this general principle, there are specific instances of at-risk archives that include meta fanworks. Grandfathering in previously posted meta or disallowing meta except for that taken in through Open Doors leads to an inconsistent policy likely to cause confusion, conflict, and difficulty in enforcement.

We hope this answers some of your comments and concerns. We welcome further input and look forward to working with our personnel and our users in continuing to welcome a broad range of fannish endeavors under the OTW umbrella.

After a long period of discussion, the OTW Board has voted to allow the posting of meta on the Archive of Our Own. We considered a range of issues while making this decision, including how this move would fit into the overall mission of the OTW, the technical and financial resources required, and demand from users of the Archive and members of the OTW. We determined that there is already a demand for meta on the Archive, and that this use of our resources is consonant with our purview and mission.

We're aware that this decision has taken some time, and we sincerely apologize for the delay. We had hoped to reach a decision sooner, but the complexity of the discussion meant we needed to think carefully about the issues. As the term of some OTW Board members ended while the discussion was ongoing, we also needed time for the new Board members to get up-to-speed with all the issues involved.

What will happen next?

Agreeing to include meta on the Archive is just the first step in this journey. The Board will now work with all related committees to define exactly how meta will be handled. Our committees, including AD&T (which will be doing the work on the technical side), Abuse, Support, and others, will be working with our Content Policy workgroup to design a workable policy.

One of the main tasks ahead of us is to agree on some definitions and policies. We need to agree on definitions that are usable and enforceable. While any category is inevitably fuzzy, we want to preserve the Archive as a site for fanworks (so for example, we don't want it to become a general blogging site). Once we've agreed on these definitions, our committees will have a whole range of tasks ahead of them, including:

• Drafting revisions to our Terms of Service and FAQ. Revisions to the Archive TOS will be subject to a public review period (as detailed under Section IB of the TOS) before becoming final.
• Determining technical plans for making meta more accessible. We are already planning changes to posting and browsing on the Archive to allow for multimedia hosting. We do not expect meta to require any additional coding to implement beyond what will be required for these changes, and allowing meta won't change the existing prioritization of these features, but we will need to factor it into our design.
• Determining tagging policies to allow for multimedia and meta browsing.

What will be allowed?

Our Content Policy workgroup will be posting guidelines on what will fall under the 'meta' category and the policies which will apply to it in the next two weeks.

What does this mean for me?

Going forward, we hope that this will mean you can find and enjoy fannish meta more easily (and screen it out if you're not interested).

If you currently have meta posted on the Archive, or you plan to post some in the near future, you should be aware that our policies are still being finalized. As action on existing meta posts was suspended while Board deliberated on this issue, in the coming months some users may be contacted in connection to how their posts fit the new policies. We recommend that users wait until these policies are made public before putting a lot of effort into new meta posts. However, we hope that, long term, meta writers will feel their contributions to the archive are welcome and can join other fanworks in finding an audience at the AO3.

Thoughts?

If you have thoughts and feedback you'd like us to consider, we ask that you comment here on the AO3 version of this post, to make it easier for the various committees involved to answer you and collate your replies.